Good question. Lightning actually makes it down to earth in a tiny fraction of a second. If you’re counting one lightning ‘strike’ as the amount of bolts that flutter back and forth between the cloud and the ground through a given channel (meaning the flash flickers over the exact same spot along the same path)…we have sometimes seen more than 20 of them…all in less than a second. If you’re counting a ‘bolt’ to mean the number of branches in a single lightning strike (in appearance)…there’s presumably no limit to how fractured the bolt of lightning strike could get. A single ‘bolt’ of lightning could have any number of little splits and frays of electricity along it. On average, lightning strikes the Earth about 6000 times per minute.